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Friday, October 7, 2011

You know, I admittedly play at this art-thing. I consider myself a fair draftsman, though I like to think I am getting better with each attempt. Artistically, pencil-drawing has always been my first love, the media in which I think my skills are most honed. I enjoy portraiture, and have even been commissioned to create portraits now and then.

I also love horror films and the female form. Thankfully, I am not alone in this. The horror film industry has provided a plethora of female imagery to gaze upon with wonder. There is a tantalizing juxtaposition between the sensual and the sinister. It is this juxtaposition that currently attracts my attention.

These pencil portraits take days each to create. The drawings alone for each of these spanned a period of four days, working admittedly only a few hours each day on the images. My schedule prevents me from producing such works at the pace that I would like, but it gives me some time to decide what monsters I will add next to my collection of beloved dead.

When Return of the Living Dead 3 came out in 1993, I was 20 years old, and freely admit that the image of a punk-rock pierced-up zombie-girl was titillating (ha!) on a number of levels. I really dug the first film, I don't even remember the 2nd, but the 3rd film really stuck with me. As you may recall, Julie was infected with the zombie-toxin, and in order to stave-off her hunger for brains she had to pierce herself with a variety of objects (nails, glass-shards, metal rings, etc).

I created this image from the film were Julie emerges after her self-piercing session. The camera pans up from her mid-drift to her face. The problem was that I didn't get it all in one shot; the camera panning up is followed by a shot were she raised her face to the camera. To get the above image, I had to go back-and-forth between different frames of the film until I got the posture and expression I wanted, and then used several stills for reference, especially for the variety of chains she wears.

And now you know.

The Angry Princess from Thir13en Ghosts presented her own set of problems. If I remember correctly, Dana was a girl who over-indulged in plastic surgery, seeing imperfection whenever she looked at herself. A self-inflicted operation to remove an imaginary blemish resulted in her loosing an eye, and she committed suicide with her butcher's knife in a bathtub. The actress is not nude in the film, but is instead wearing a body-suit.

Still, it's very convincing.

There is a classic image of the Angry Princess as she rounds a corner, her knife jutting out in front of her. Do a Google-search of "Angry Princess" and you will see what I mean. I thought about that image for my representation, but decided it was too common. Instead, I used a sequence of images right after she witnesses the lawyer being cut in half but before she hers the people upstairs and vanishes. Again, I referred to several stills from that sequence to get the posture and expression I wanted. Next, because of the low-light, I had to refer to other images to get the cuts on her body correct. The expression seems a little off to me, but I am pleased by the whole.

So, now I am thinking about who will be next. I have in mind the Bride from The Bride of Frankenstein, the Wire-Twins from Hellraiser: Inferno, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, the nurses from Silent Hill, and the female alien from Species. I am racking my brain trying to come-up with other candidates. I decided to pass on Trash from the first Return of the Living Dead because I don't like her zombie make-up, but I have been thinking of doing a water-color painting of her infamous graveyard strip-tease.

Your suggestions would be more than welcome. Just drop a comment below.